Moderation as a recipe for disaster

Here’s a fascinating essay well worth your time from political scientists Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach, who argue that:

(1) Moderation as a political strategy used to make much more sense than it does today, in what has become a highly polarized and nationalized political environment.

(2) Indeed under current conditions the overall value for electoral purposes of adopting moderate positions is very hard to detect. To the extent it still exists at all, it’s very contingent and context-dependent. As some sort of grand strategy for the Democratic party it definitely does not make any sense, and is in fact almost certainly counter-productive.

(3) Talking about “kitchen table” issues when faced with a massive authoritarian threat to liberal democracy is not only wrong, it’s stupid. (I’m putting this more strongly than the authors do, but I think it’s a fair assessment of their argument.).

(4) The best strategy for Democrats is to attack Trumpist authoritarianism as such, and to do so at its weakest point from an electoral perspective, which is its flagrantly open corruption. A wide swath of ideologically diverse voters hate corruption, and in particular believe strongly that the system is rigged against ordinary people in various ways. This is something that the Davos Democrats (my term, not the authors’) are in a poor position to exploit for obvious reasons. I suspect this is also why so many prominent Democrats seem hesitant to fully exploit the political potential of the Epstein files.

I am but a simple country pseudo-lawyer, but at the most basic level what we’re looking at here seems like the poli sci version of Pascal’s wager. The evidence that, under current conditions, deviating from principled positions will win you votes is actually very weak. The evidence that doing so will end up costing you votes on net is at least as good. If there’s no demonstrable pragmatic advantage to “moderating” aka betraying, your political principles, doing so is lose-lose. The obvious gamble is to do the right thing, because not doing it isn’t likely to get you anything anyway.

There are a bunch of responses to the essay which I haven’t read yet, but the essay itself is something you should look at.